If you have 2,000 reads, you know your book is good.

I attended WorldCon in the fall of 2013. As anyone who regularly attends Cons might expect, I brushed shoulders with many nice (and sometimes very nice and weird) people dressed in extravagant costumes that one only ever sees at international Cons (at least, I’ve never personally seen full centaur costumes at Halloween parties!). One of those fine people was Teresa Nielson, the managing editor of TOR. After a brief discussion, I asked her what she thought of Wattpad, an online venue for prospective authors (mostly teenage girls).

She offered some background thoughts about websites where authors share their stories and then offered two pieces of advice. First, she said, if you get 2,000 reads, you know you have a good book. I heartily received that pithy advice as a welcomed word of encouragement because at the time, my rather raw (not fully edited) version of Moon 514 was averaging 1,000 reads per day on Wattpad! To be fair, the reads were chapter reads but eventually, I racked up 133,576 reads, which amounts to about 33,000 book reads in well under a year’s time! Wattpad had a major crash and lost a lot of their data so I’m currently only showing around 40,000 reads but I suppose I can live with that since she offered another word of advice: if people are wanting to read the next chapter, that is another strong indicator that you have a good book. A number of my Wattpad readers teased me with scolding messages complaining that they couldn’t wait to read the new chapter and one reader sent me a message asking whether or not I intended to write the sequel!

If Teresa is right, I guess that means I have a good book! Moon 514 is scheduled for release this March, 2014. For now, you can read a raw version of it on Wattpad. You can find me at:@B_L_A_Z_Eand the book is listed under its subtitle. I’ll be pulling most of it from Wattpad once it’s released …